


Apollo's Chosen

by thedevilchicken



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Orpheus and Eurydice (Metamorphoses - Ovid)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Dark, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Magic, Music, Retelling, female Orpheus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2019-05-17
Packaged: 2020-03-06 20:49:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18858853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Orpheus knows exactly who she is.





	Apollo's Chosen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reine_des_corbeaux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/gifts).



Orpheus knows exactly who she is. 

She had another name once but the fact she can't remember it doesn't really matter; that was when she was a girl, before the temple and, more importantly, before the lyre. She can measure her whole life in four separate phases just like that one: before the lyre; after the lyre; _Eurydice_ ; and the fucking wasteland that is now. The first part seems so long ago, perhaps only because she's been mourning forever. 

Her mother took her to the temple because she'd never said a word or made a sound, not when she'd fallen from the olive tree she wasn't meant to climb, not even the day she was born. Her mother hoped Apollo's priests could help to make things right - they were healers, she said, very skilled, blessed by the god of of healing himself, and if they couldn't help then no one could. Orpheus has never been sure if she hoped they'd help her daughter or herself. She hopes for one and believes the other.

She remembers wishing she could speak to tell her mother she was sorry, but she couldn't speak and the priests couldn't help. The nice ones tickled her till she shook with silent laughter, but still she couldn't make a sound; the ones she didn't like pricked her toes with needles and wouldn't let her jerk away, but she couldn't yelp to make them stop. The priests couldn't help and so her mother left her there. She promised that Apollo would protect her, but it was the nice ones who fed her. At least they did if she kept things clean. 

Days passed, or months did, or maybe it was years - she wouldn't know as no one ever thought to teach those things to her, beneath their notice as she was. It was a timeless time, before the lyre, and she learned Apollo was a god of many talents; people came there to the temple seeking oracles of bountiful futures, or to pray he'd guide their arrows when they went into the woods to hunt, or to ask him to inspire their uninspired poetry... and sometimes, some days, they came to play and sing. Apollo had given music to the world, the priests said, so they liked to show him thanks for it. She liked to stay and listen but she wasn't really meant to, so she had to hide. 

She remembers hiding there in the temple so she could hear the people singing just outside the doors. She remembers the altar all covered up in withering flowers the priests had her take out to the fire sometimes and when she threw the petals in, they'd dance there on the hot air over the flames and try to burn her fingers. She remembers the great bronze statue, tall and smooth and perfect on the pedestal, his feet and ankles polished gleaming by a thousand people's hands though she herself was always scared to touch. She remembers the sudden flood of golden light so bright it stung her eyes and made her chest feel tight. Perhaps it was the morning sunlight on the metal but she didn't think so then and doesn't now. She thinks it was Apollo. 

"This is for you," he said, looking up, and she thinks _he_ was Apollo, too. She's not sure how he would have know where to find her if she wasn't, or where to look inside the room, because she was as quiet as a mouse there in the rafters. Then he held out a lyre that shone gold like the sun and when she crept out of her hiding place she almost didn't dare to take it. When she did, it was heavy in her hands. When she plucked the strings, experimentally, Apollo smiled at her. 

She could only keep the lyre a secret for so long, of course, and when the priests found her playing, they weren't sure what to do. Should they take it from her? They had no idea where it had come from - had she stolen it, perhaps? No theft had been reported and there was no doubt the owner would have missed an instrument as beautiful as this one. Should they send her away? Even then, while she was still just learning, the notes she chose to play seemed to tug at them inside. Was it witchcraft? Perhaps they could use it. They decided to use it. When they looked at her, the gold in their eyes was not the sun. Their smiles were nothing like Apollo's. 

No one would come to hear a girl play, they said, so they cut her long, unruly hair with the priests' golden shears and dressed her as a boy. She was still small then, scrawny and wide-eyed and only prettyish, not pretty, so nobody would notice. Their kitherodes taught her how to string her lyre and how to properly maintain it, how to pluck it, then how to play. Their songs didn't suit her but she learned them even so, played then again and again till they rang in her dreams while she slept and her fingers twitched to be at the strings. The priests listened at her lessons with an eager ear and eager eye. They never made her burn the flowers again. She never scrubbed another floor. She would earn her keep another way.

"You play beautifully," the priests told her, but their opinions mattered to her very little. She still remembered their tests. She still remembered their needles.

"You play beautifully," her teacher told her, but she wasn't satisfied with that. Not when all she did was copy him, note for note for gods-damned note. 

When the festival came, when she played on the steps outside the temple doors, she didn't play their songs - she was meant to, and they'd planned for her to, but she played her own instead. She'd practiced in her room at night, behind the door that wasn't locked but might as well have been. She'd practiced in her head when she lay in bed, imagining she played for the man she'd met that day. When she played on the steps outside the temple doors, she thanked Apollo for her gift with every note she played. Her heart welled up and she closed her eyes, and the people who heard all wept with joy. 

"Who is he?" they asked, with their cheeks still stained with tears. "What's his name?"

The priests said, "Orpheus," and after that they came from far and wide to hear her, as tales of Orpheus' talents spread. She played every day, for hours on end, while people sang or people listened, and the priests of Apollo Citharoedus all grew ever richer. She continued to improve in leaps and bounds and the priests took full advantage. They had her enchant their visitors to empty out their pockets till they'd filled the temple's coffers; they had her make them leave there grateful for it, and willing to come back with more. They told her that she owed them everything, and so what she did was just repayment of her debt to them. Sometimes she wondered if Apollo, if he'd seen her, would have been ashamed, or if he'd have been glad to hear her play.

When the tall man came to ask for Orpheus' help, the priests told him no and they turned him away, but there was a look on his face as he left - determined and resolved - that she thinks the priests in their derision must have overlooked. He returned at night to speak to Orpheus directly, stole inside and stood in her room in the pale light of her god's twin's moon, and asked her if she'd go with him. He asked her if she'd sail with him, and leave that place just for a while. If they lived, she could return. When she plucked her response at the lyre, he frowned but he understood her. 

"No, you don't have to come back," he said. "I certainly won't make you."

She nodded curtly and she gathered her things, not that she had many of them. She'd paid her debt to the priests and then some.

Three days later, or maybe it was a month had passed, they sailed for Colchis with mighty sons of gods all pulling at the oars. Orpheus sat playing by the figurehead; with the sea breeze in her hair and a smile on her face, her music buoyed their spirits up. And when they'd passed the clashing rocks, passed Scylla and Charybdis, when Jason had the golden fleece, she did not return to the temple. 

Orpheus knows who she is. It's difficult for other people, because they only know the things she lets them, the things she tells them with the lyre, but the day that she met Eurydice seemed to change that. When she came across the leafy grove where the wood nymphs danced, they all fled except Eurydice. With trembling hands, in the dappled light, Orpheus put down the lyre. And Eurydice smiled at her, just like Apollo had. 

"Hello, Orpheus," she said. "My father's told me all about you." 

She couldn't reply, at least not in words, and her lyre was sitting on her cloak on the mossy ground, but it didn't seem she had to. When Eurydice took her hands in hers, Apollo's music in her veins surged up to meet her, speaking things she could never say aloud. And Orpheus, full up inside with hope and love, and with this radiant woman's beauty, hoped she'd never let them go again. 

They were married in the summer, waist-deep in the long grass that shed dew on their bare legs beneath the early morning sun. Orpheus didn't need to play her lyre for her wife to understand her, or to know her; when they went to the grove in the woods, when they took off their clothes, Eurydice already seemed to know exactly what she'd find. Orpheus was tall and lithe and strong, her chest low and level as a man's as if the pluck of her lyre had willed it so, as if she'd made herself into the shape she wanted. And although she remained just as beardless as her god was, it was thanks to the enchantment of her music that no one had suspected. Eurydice knew, and always had. 

Eurydice pressed her mouth between Orpheus' thighs, there in the grove in the light through the trees. She made her gasp and arch her back against the ground and wish that she could say her name, but her lips couldn't even form the shape of it. When Eurydice rose to kiss her, that no longer seemed to matter. Not even her golden lyre did. Then, when she touched her hands to Eurydice's hips, she learned that she could play her lover's body just as well as my instrument. 

Now Eurydice is dead. Perhaps it was yesterday or a month ago, or then again perhaps it's years, but the timing of it changes nothing. She picked up her lyre for the first time since they met. Her Eurydice's dead and she took her grief down to the underworld and she showed it to its king, she played it to him, yearning, her aching loss in every note. Moved, he told her she could have her back, and now she'll never know if Hades told a lie or if her losing her again is all her own fault because when she turned around, there was no one there. Hades says there are rules and she can't try again but the rules are what he makes them. He's the one that's stopping her. He could give her back as easily as breathing. 

Orpheus knows exactly who she is. She's not the hero - or the man - that they think she is. The songs she plays don't only bring joy, contentedness, and peace. She's the chosen of Apollo, whose music can enchant men's hearts to many things, so the priests who raised her taught. And while was sailing on the Argo, the music that she played was even stronger than the Sirens. But that doesn't mean she didn't learn from them. 

When she plays her songs of war, men fight and kill and die for it. And now, in this place she knows the barrier between the worlds is thinnest, she plays her golden lyre. She plays on her knees in the dirt, and she _screams_ with it. She'll send down the souls of so many men and women that Tartarus will overflow. This will be the only sound she ever makes. She'll drive them mad.

Apollo is the god of music and of healing and of _prophecy_. In this moment, she understands it clearly: her muteness isn't arbitrary. She was always meant to be his vengeance for Eurydice. She was never meant to speak.

Either they'll kill her here, she thinks, or else Hades will open up the gates of hell and bring Eurydice back to her himself. She doesn't much care which it is.

Either way, they'll be together. And Apollo will be proud.


End file.
